UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Elizabeth C. Mansfield, distinguished professor of art history in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, has been named a Guggenheim Fellow and a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) for the 2026-27 academic year, during which time she will work on a book project about the visual culture of 18th-century Britain.
These two honors are among the highest achievements for artists and scholars, placing Mansfield in an elite group that includes multiple Nobel Laureates.
B. Stephen Carpenter II, the Michael J. and Aimee Rusinko Kakos Dean in the College of Arts and Architecture, said these dual honors serve as well-deserved recognition of the work Mansfield is doing in her field.
“To receive both honors in one year is a testament to Professor Mansfield’s prior achievements, her future research and writing, and her role as one of the leading art historians in the United States,” Carpenter said. “We are incredibly proud that she is a member of the College of Arts and Architecture faculty.”
As a 2026-27 Guggenheim Fellow, Mansfield is among 223 scholars and artists from 52 disciplines chosen for their “prior career achievement and exceptional promise,” according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. All fellows receive a stipend to pursue their work under “the freest possible conditions.”
She is one of 10 current and incoming IAS scholars to be appointed a 2026-27 Guggenheim Fellow. Each year, the IAS welcomes more than 250 of the world’s most promising postdoctoral researchers and scholars who are selected and mentored by a permanent faculty, all of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Mansfield will be a member of the School of Historical Studies.
“When you look through the list of past recipients of Guggenheim and IAS fellowships, you see the names of scholars and artists who have inspired so many through their work,” Mansfield said. “The prospect of having my name added to the list is truly overwhelming.”
Mansfield said her Guggenheim Fellow and IAS Scholar positions will allow her to complete a long-deferred book project, “Picture This: Realism and the Empirical Imagination,” addressing research questions that arose while she was writing her second book, “The Perfect Foil: François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting,” which was published in 2011.
“I am exploring how new ideas about visual perception, memory and imagination helped make certain kinds of images — obviously fanciful images — seem truthful to 18th-century viewers [of European art],” Mansfield said. “The way particular forms of visual representation can impart truthfulness to certain audiences is, of course, not just of historical interest, as anyone who uses the internet knows full well! Thanks to IAS and the Guggenheim, I am going to be able to see the book manuscript through to completion.”
Mansfield’s focus on this project was diverted most recently by research into the history of computer vision. She collaborated with Penn State computer scientists James Wang and Jia Li and their doctoral students on a multi-year, National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project that investigated the use of machine learning in the analysis of 18th- and 19th-century European landscape painting.
“That research made me think differently about the history of visual technologies in relation to art history. So, a couple of years ago, when I tried to start writing my planned book on ways of seeing in the 18th century, I was so struck by parallels with today that I ended up instead writing a book on the entangled histories of computer vision and art history,” said Mansfield, whose book on art history and artificial intelligence (AI), “Ground Truth: Art History and the Invention of Computer Vision,” is slated for publication by the University of Minnesota Press in 2027.
In Mansfield’s view, many day-to-day assumptions about the way vision and visual representation work are rooted in beliefs that took hold during the Enlightenment.
“The discipline of art history was basically invented in the 18th century, so it’s not surprising to see Enlightenment beliefs baked into art historical practices, for better or worse,” Mansfield said. “More surprising to me is the degree to which these ideas helped to shape the development and popular reception of AI systems designed to analyze, interpret or even generate visual images.”
Mansfield said Realism was identified in the mid-19th-century by critics who saw something new happening in art and literature, but she hopes to place so-called Realist art and literature in a longer history of European culture.
“To understand Realism, in my view, you have to first understand the advent in the 18th century of an understanding of visual perception such that painters were believed able to render exact portraits of individual clouds but incapable of capturing an accurate likeness of a child under the age of 12,” Mansfield said. “What we see has a lot to do with what we think we can see.”